3 June: Higher seminar in Rethinking research practices in Art, Technology and Design

Welcome to our higher seminars in Rethinking research practices in Art, Technology and Design!

We are very happy to inform you that the last higher seminar of this semester will take place with the artist and researcher Lisa Tan on June 3, 2-4.30pm at Konstfack (room: Zickerman)The seminar will be based on a close viewing and discussion of Tan’s video Notes From Underground, 2013 (23 min 45 sec). This work is one in a series of three videos that engage a threshold within a natural physical process. The works drift between day and night, above and below ground, and between land and sea. Each journey has a literary figure as guide: Lispector, Sontag, Woolf.

Lisa Tan writes: “Sontag was my companion in Notes. I took her with me as I repeatedly traveled Stockholm’s complete transit network to its terminal stations—but kept returning to the blue line. It heads in a westward direction. So I kept heading even further west, onward to the desert, until we arrived at the caves in New Mexico. Because if one wants to court an experience of liminality and momentarily untether subjectivity in order to re-enter it and the world more knowingly, then Deleuze and Guattari have a formula:

This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times.

At the seminar Tan wants to discuss with us what forms and methods this meticulousness could be when applied within art practice.

Lisa Tan (born 1973, Syracuse, New York) is an artist living in Stockholm. She completed a practice-based PhD at the University of Gothenburg, Valand Academy and an MFA from the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles. Her recent series of videos has been exhibited as a group at Galleri Riis, Stockholm (2015), and individually at the ICA Philadelphia (2016), the Triennial exhibition at the New Museum, New York (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (2015); Lofoten International Art Festival, Svolvær (2013); Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Lisbon (2013); Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm (2013); Parra & Romero, Madrid (2012); VidalCuglietta, Brussels (2012). Screenings have taken place at lothringer13_florida, Munich (2015), Kino Der Kunst, Munich (2013), Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2014), Temporary Gallery, Cologne (2012).

Sunsets, Notes From Underground, Waves, a book on Tan’s videos is published by Archive Books, Berlin and available also through Anagram Books and locally at Konst-ig Books. For more: www.lisatan.net

Prior to the seminar Tan invites you to read the following two texts:

Text: The Shadow is Just as Tangible as the Origin, by Mara Lee

Text: For every word has its own shadow (excerpt), by Lisa Tan

The texts are distributed by petra.bauer@konstfack.se

We have a limited number of places, so please send an email to petra.bauer@konstfack.se if you want to participate.

The higher seminar series aim to provide a platform for a continuous and dynamic exchange on matters pertaining to research within Konstfack at large – senior researchers, faculty, practitioners, doctoral candidates and students – as well as with students, researchers and practitioners in affiliated fields and institutions. The higher seminar series is open to the public.

By “higher seminar” we refer to a format where an invited seminar presenter, such as doctoral candidates, researchers and other experts, provides material(s) in advance, which should be carefully reviewed by participants before each specific seminar session. The seminar is focused on a critical encounter and discussion on the provided material(s).

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 161.